By Sladja Blažan. University of Virginia Press, 2024.

Still dominant today, psychological readings of ghosts have obscured the precariousness of lives affected by colonial structures of the early republic. Ghosts and Their Hosts demonstrates that in the transcultural U.S. American context, ghostly figurations were able to express human entanglements with nonhuman environments, which are explored here for the first time. Not only a corrective to metaphysical accounts, a materialist reading of ghosts is crucial to understanding the colonial history and legacy of the United States, the importance of spectral matters to the exclusivist definition of the supposedly universal human within this context, and the work of literature and culture in establishing these parameters, traces of which are recognizable all the way into twenty-first-century popular culture.

When ghosts do materialize in early and antebellum American narratives, they are commonly those of male settlers of European descent who come to claim territory, history, and future. Codified as animated by Indigenous spirits, Nature is their antagonist. As a domain of the dead, the animated forest became for settler colonial writers the space where they could securely infix the living Indigenous population without compromising their own situatedness in what was conveniently termed the New World, suggesting regeneration and new life as a cyclical continuation of death. The book explores this racialized forest that is at the heart not only of early American narratives but remains a topos until today.

Sladja Blažan received her Ph.D. in North American Literature and Culture from Humboldt University Berlin and her Habilitation in American Studies from University Würzburg. She has taught as a professor for Literature and Media Cultures at Philipps-Universität Marburg, University Würzburg, Bard College Berlin/Annandale-on-Hudson, New York University, Free University Berlin, Dutch Art Institute, Humboldt University Berlin and University College Dublin. Research areas include subjectivity studies, speculative fiction, critical posthumanism, environmental humanities, and critical refugee studies. Her book Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World was published last month with University of Virginia Press. Other publications include the edited collection Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman, the manuscript American Fictionary: Postsozialistische Migration in der U.S. Amerikanischen Literatur and numerous articles on the intersection of race, gender and class issues.